iOS Feature Highlight: New Lookback in Budgets

Hey Mint readers – my name is Peter Fong, I’m an iOS engineer here at Mint and worked on a recent feature update for Budgets. Hopefully you’ve already discovered it – but if not – they asked me to share what the new feature is (we’ve received many requests for it over the last year).

A little background – budgets is where Mint started. It’s a big help for people to track where their money is going every month and to make sure they don’t overspend in certain categories. Not to mention, it’s one of the main reasons people discover and start using the app.

It’s super smart & easy to get started when you sign up for Mint – it suggests how your money should be distributed in the month, based on your previous spending patterns. But one area that we kept hearing from users that was increasingly frustrating was the lack of option to look back on the previous month’s budget (this was available to our web users, but not in mobile).

So, I took this on as a project and am happy to report: Mint’s budgets (iOS app only) can now look back three months so you can better track your progress and spending behaviors.

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Now, why would someone need to do this? There could be several reasons – the first is, many times bank transactions from the end of one month don’t post until the beginning of the next month. This way you can not only adjust the date of the transaction, but see how it affected your budget. In the past, you could always adjust the date, but you could never see the impact on your final spend for the month.

Another benefit, many people can use this new feature as way to track improvement! If you were constantly overspending in your restaurant budget and then start consciously choosing to eat in more, being able to see the difference in how it’s affecting your budget month over month is motivating.

This feature is available on iOS only. It shows the previous three month’s worth of budgets and you can see it simply by swiping left to right from the budget page (which you tap through to from the overview & updates tabs in your app) or tapping the arrow next to the month at the top. We hope to bring to Android soon!

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Peter Fong, is an iOS engineer at Mint for the last two years. He is an avid video gamer, soccer player and enjoys to hiking in the beautiful mountains surrounding the Bay Area. He’s also a pretty big tech-junkie and actively seeks out the latest and greatest in the tech world.